The weather is important when writing a play,
Such is when Romeo and Juliet was shown,
It was a cold and raining day.

So the audience would forget about the heat,
Off in fair Verona had Shakespeare failed,
To keep mention of the begrudging summer.

I have frozen lake independence—
self-sufficiency stuck in a state of stasis,
waiting for spring or a better excuse.

I’m the last bud in the bag,
that lonely bit of green at the bottom—
each time you reach for me,
you know you’re running out.

I’m a scarf left outside,
stiff as a corpse, wrapped tight
around a post under the overpass.
Some do-gooder tied a note to me—
“Take me if you need me.”

but nobody needs me.
everybody’s got their own warmth,
their own coat, their own somebody.

so I stay there,
*******, forgotten,
waiting for some cold *******
to come along and wrap me
around their neck.

A Gulf Stream wisp, whistles, languidly,
along, a recalcitrant breeze.
Speaking of temperature, angrily.
The Pavement, can't help, but, freeze.

Branches, embarrass themselves,
with, protruding bark, baring all.
Their dream, is to one day, be shelves.
When, a messianic carpenter, calls.

Teeth clench. Bold, Blizzard, barges in,
nervous Fangs, creek, in Her presence.
She peppers, horizons, white, arduous sin.
Tusks, sign, mute alarms, luminescent.

Coy burrows, open their arms, to hug,
their Creators, for crisp slumbers, ahead.
Moonlit Creatures, pull and tug.
At soil, Voodoo dolls, to stab, Winter, dead.

© poormansdreams

February bites down—
wind with a switchblade edge,
sky like the underbelly of something dead,
clawing at a season that turns its back,
half-winter, half-wishbone,
stuck in the throat of the year.

Sidewalks crack like dry lips.
Trees wear loneliness like a borrowed skin—
bare, brittle, bracing for something
that never arrives.

The sky stays gray,
an unanswered text.
Days sink like forgotten receipts in my tote,
asking things I can’t answer,
whispering, Didn’t you think you’d feel different by now?
Didn’t I?

The cold is a debt I keep paying in shivers,
in chapped hands, in mornings that taste like spoiled perfume
and dreams of other cities, where I wake up panting,
where I breathe out his name like an epiphany,
and let my eyes sigh closed like a prayer.

I walk through the days like a half-lit hallway,
never sure what I’m looking for,
never sure I’ll find it.

I forget what my hands were made for.
I press my palm against the frost-bitten glass,
just to prove I’m still warm-blooded.

February unspools, soft and slow,
a ribbon of time that never quite ties into a bow,
a breath held too long in a house too small.

And I—
I stand at the edge of the month like a skipped stone,
almost ready to sink, almost ready to fly,
caught in the soft ache of almost,
in the half-light of wanting.

March will come like an answer
to a question I don’t remember,
but tonight, February lingers—
a ghost-limbed thing,
a name I still chase in the dark,
leaving me unfinished,
half-written,
half-here.